I'm living in one of these places now and I could not say enough negative things about the place or AirBNB. Its a mess, most of the rooms are either filled with beds or used entirely for furniture/tool storage. There were no shared trashbins until about 4-6 weeks after I had arrived. One of the guests had a severe breakdown and would spend hours in the middle of the night rapping or shouting at the top of the lungs, forcing his roommates to move to the permanent tents in the backyard. Eventually the guy left during one of his rants and disappeared for a few days, during which the landlord had us avoid calling the police because he did not want to have them involved. Worst of all, I feel like none of us are in a position to do anything. I complained within a few hours of arrival on my first day because the place is a mess, but AirBNB charges a months rent to leave early on a long term stay and there's nothing to gain in destroying our relatioships with the landlord. The rating system also makes it so that taking any action would probably result in an open flame war so that I'd probably get rejected by future landlords. I'll probably never use AirBNB again regardless.
"The rating system also makes it so that taking any action would probably result in an open flame war so that I'd probably get rejected by future landlords."
Airbnb ratings is the worst part. You can't trust them at all. That makes using Airbnb like playing Russian roulette.
There's no negative feedback on the shittiest places.
Completely agree. AirBnB de facto bribes you to not leave negative ratings. Last cancellation I had was from a no-show host, who left me without a place to stay in Canary Wharf in London, had to shell out AirBnb price + $100 for a last minute replacement, minus the 3 hours I spent waiting for the host (she was mysteriously in Russia instead of London). Host wouldn't give me my money back unless I promised not to give a bad rating. AirBnB offered me a $50 credit for my next stay. W00t.
Guess what? That no show host still has perfect ratings...
It sounds like you're using AirBNB for a longterm sublet...I didn't even know that was possible! I've had nothing but great experiences using it in NYC (>5 times), but then I've always used it for a weekend stay.
Can I ask why you used AirBNB for something so far outside the "normal" zone that it's pitched for? Why not just do a craigslist search for longterm sublets?
I actually found the place through craigslist, but the owner said he preferred to use AirBNB for payment. Most of the tenants here are long term grad students here for at least a semester.
Wow... You guys seem to have had horrible experiences. May I ask what area you are staying in?
I've stayed at Airbnb places in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn area about ten times now over the past couple years and my experience has been satisfactory every time. And I've stayed in the entire range of Airbnb, from very nice places where I'm basically a roommate for a month and eating meals with my host, etc, to places where I rarely see the owner and it is obvious they don't live there but just rent it out, to an old loft that was subdivided into small rooms and being rented out to four different Airbnb guests at once. The subdivided loft one was probably the most illegal one I ever stayed in because it certainly wasn't up to code but it was still very cool and the other guests were polite and quiet.
The only time I've ever had a bad experience with AirBNB was once when staying at a place in San Francisco which turned out to be very dirty due to the owner being out of country and just having his next door neighbor give the keys to short term renters.
The rating system also makes it so that taking any action would probably result in an open flame war so that I'd probably get rejected by future landlords.
I call bullshit on this. Leaving a bad review on a host is not going to get you rejected by future landlords unless those landlords are also running dumps and they don't want to get bad reviews, and in that case you probably don't want to stay there anyway.
The key is to find places that have lots of reviews and read them. If you see anything amiss don't stay there. If you stick to well reviewed places you will have a great experience.
If you choose to break new ground and try completely new unreviewed places (which I have done from time to time) it is more of a gamble. You can also get some great experiences that way as well, because in general newer, unreviewed places don't charge as much so as to attract people, while the older very well reviewed and run places will charge nearly double in most cases compared to brand new places. Basically, you get what you pay for, as with many other things in life.
> "The key is to find places that have lots of reviews and read them."
I've done this, I'm rather risk-averse with it comes to AirBnbs, and I've still run into bad places. I've had two bad experiences in this regard:
- One was a nice apartment, but I found out the landlord (the word "host" is both disingenuous and inaccurate for AirBnb and I despise the attempt at newspeak) lived full time in the room I was renting. She was old and clearly needed the supplemental income, and I displaced her onto the couch.
This was not made at all clear beforehand, and her place had many positive reviews. I did not sign up to displace an elderly person from her own bed, nor did I sign up to deny someone their only source of badly needed income. I suspect a lot of the positive reviews came from this. There was nothing otherwise wrong with the apartment.
- In the other one the bedroom was nice, at a good location, but the landlord had a dog that pissed and shat all over the common areas. Her place also had no shortage of good reviews (over a dozen at the time IIRC). In this case also it was clear she needed the supplemental income, and she was so damn apologetic about it and spent so much time trying to clean up after the dog that it was hard to write a negative review. I suspect, again, that this is why the place was so positively rated.
AirBnb's system is far from foolproof. In both cases I abstained from reviewing the places - a move I'm still unsure about. One thing I am sure about is that I resent being put in a position where I have such profound influence on someone's (badly needed) livelihood.
I guess the issue then is that its hard to balance trying to be nice to the person and being honest in your review. Personally I don't have a problem calling out issues in my reviews because I feel like I owe it to future people who want to find a place on Airbnb to leave accurate reviews.
But yeah I agree that its not easy to leave a bad review sometimes. Usually there is a way you can word it that isn't mean or bad, but which lets future potential guests know what to expect.
> "Usually there is a way you can word it that isn't mean or bad, but which lets future potential guests know what to expect."
Sure, and I did actually go back afterwards to see if I was just too thick to read between the lines. Couldn't find anything definitive, maybe some oblique hints.
Either way though, judiciously worded faux-reviews seem like they make the problem worse, not better. It forces the system into a state where only the power users know WTF is actually going on, and for everyone else the information is pure noise. You spend less time reading what's on the page and more time reading what isn't.
Funnily enough, this reminds me of the rental market in NYC, where it's all between-the-lines parsing and the system has invented a whole 'nother vocabulary to avoid saying what's what (see: "flex" 2-bedrooms).
This is one of the fundamental problems. I have no compunctions about leaving a hotel a bad review, because I know that they can afford it in the short run, and that as a stimulus mechanism for them to correct themselves, it's likely to work. In this case though, I don't think these landlords could afford a bad review, and they are not in a position where a bad review is a correcting mechanism - it's more likely to sink them entirely instead.
I guess in a traditional hotel you don't care about the hotel owner and you are one of numerous faceless people passing through on a daily basis so leaving bad reviews is easy. In the Airbnb system not only have you met the host face to face and in some cases spent some time with them, and what's more it really isn't even possible to leave an anonymous review because the host can pretty easily tell who left the review based on the timing of its appearance.
The thing is Airbnb originates from the couch surfing and hostel ecosystem which has considerably less controls and reviews but also a guest base who in general are willing to put up with less than savory conditions. Airbnb kind of tames that wild west of couch surfing by providing a review system and a more legitimate system of paying and getting paid. But it doesn't reach the full legitimacy of a corporate hotel.
Some of my friends ask me whether or not they should try Airbnb, and based on their personalities I will sometimes tell them no, because I know some of my friends just can't deal with it and need a real hotel. Others are more adventurous and I'll tell them to go for it.
For that subset of people who would be willing to try couch surfing on staying in a hostel Airbnb is like a luxury service and has all the key benefits of meeting interesting people and living like a local when traveling. But for people who wouldn't dare try couch surfing and find hostels unsavory then Airbnb is kind of on the edge. They might like it because it is a step above couch surfing and hostels, but most of the time they won't like Airbnb either.
I disagree. Don't take me as a "hurrr corporations" person, I am not - hotels, even chain hotels, are at the end of the day run by real people. Your local Best Western is likely run by a family, not suited, faceless corporate officers.
The difference between reviewing them and reviewing an AirBnb isn't how faceless they are, it's how much they can afford it, and how much they can actually use the review as an impetus to improve. That review does no good if it simply means the business folds.
> "The thing is Airbnb originates from the couch surfing and hostel ecosystem"
Ehhhh... I'm not sure if I buy that line of argument. Couchsurfing.org originates from the couch surfing and hostel ecosystems, where the focus is on experience with the host/guests instead of a plainly quid pro quo exchange. AirBnb has no real focus on this experiential exchange and instead has always been very firmly in the "make money on your place" camp.
AirBnb likes to portray themselves as being related to the populist communities of couch surfing and hostels, but I don't see any evidence that they were ever in that space. They certainly aren't now. I was initially an ardent supporter of AirBnb, but their persistently dishonest PR positioning has really turned me off lately; that includes their persistent and annoying efforts at positioning themselves as some sort of populist revolution.
When's the last time AirBnb ever marketed themselves as "find a place, meet cool hosts, go adventuring with your hosts/fellow guests"? Because that's a fundamentally core part of the hosteling and couch surfing ethos. AFAIK this has never been an AirBnb angle.
In fact, if you look at the featured properties (curated by AirBnb themselves) you will see a dramatic dominance in luxury properties, not cute little bungalows where you're likely to hang out with a cool host. The descriptions are also always strictly about the property, not the host, and the photographs are also strictly of the property, not the host.
The host is a small-print detail in the AirBnb model, which makes it almost entirely antithetical to hosteling or couch surfing.
Airbnb definitely isn't as host focused as something like couchsurfing.org but it also definitely isn't as purely property focused as your traditional hotel chain.
To me the property focused listings are a way for Airbnb to attract people who are too nervous to try the real couch surfing community by making Airbnb appear more like a property first hotel system. You can't blame them for this, because the subset of people who are willing to try this kind of thing if it was purely host based would be quite a bit smaller.
But the problem is that Airbnb obviously isn't a normal hotel system, and so some people who go into the experience expecting a hotel experience can be turned off by it when it doesn't meet their expectations.
On the other hand people like me who enjoy the chance to meet new people enjoy the social aspect but also like the slightly added safety of the reviews, pictures, and the payment system. Of course it depends on the host, but I've had some amazing experiences with hosts during some Airbnb stays: going to rock concerts, restaurants and bars, eating meals that they've cooked, and of course just talking to them and learning about their lives. My favorite experience was getting to stay with a couple who were aerialists for Cirque du Soleil, and months later returning to NYC to see an amazing opening performance by their own troupe of performers.
So to me Airbnb seems on the surface to be property based like you said, but underneath has a strong host ecosystem like couchsurfing.org The problem is that Airbnb is using properties to attract guests instead of the host experience. Of course this attracts people who are more demanding about the property and when the property falls short people are naturally unsatisfied.
There certainly is a small community on AirBnb that has shades of Couchsurfing, but I disagree that it's at all a substantial attribute of the system.
AirBnb has always been angling to be a hotel (or at least Bed & Breakfast) replacement.
Unfortunately AirBnb doesn't have an API, so I did the best thing I could: searched for rooms vs. whole-apartments in a way that would actually give me counts.
In and around Greenwich Village, NYC: 634 whole-apartment listings, 132 private rooms in apartments, 6 shared rooms.
On the Upper East Side: 126, 13, 2
In Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn: 146, 50, 2
In Park Slope, Brooklyn: 559, 196, 5
In Astoria, Queens: 107, 111, 7
Moving away from NYC to SF...
In the Castro: 238, 129, 3
In North Beach: 176, 67, 9
In SOMA: 421, 197, 63
Or another state entirely...
In Capitol Hill, Seattle: 130, 55, 9
In Belltown, Seattle: 96, 16, 6
All of the searches were performed with the default filters, with the additional filters being only geographic bounds and type of listing. Now, I've got experience with all of the neighborhoods listed here, and they're all places where locals actually live. We're not exclusively at, say, Times Square.
I realize you've had good experiences with AirBnb, but I've argued, and still maintain in light of this data, that AirBnb is on the surface property-based, and is also beneath property-based. There seems to be a subcommunity dedicated to the more Couchsurfing type of experiences, but the data is stacked against them. AirBnb likes to borrow and quote heavily from this subcommunity in an effort to appear more populist and grassroots, but in reality the vast majority of listings on AirBnb are dedicated rental properties, not situations where the host is even present.
Thanks for providing some real data behind the assumptions everyone has been making. I remember when AirBnB first started, it was definitely much more about people renting out spare bedrooms, in-laws, etc. but as it became more popular it was very clear to property owners that they could make more taking rental units off the market especially in markets with high nightly hotel rates like New York and San Francisco.
The reviews were mostly positive, except for one negative that did result in a flame war. I'm not sure what changed, but I heard from another one of the tenants that AirBNB was going to send a representative to check the place out after a number of complaints, but it sounds like the guy never came.
Wrong, if you write a bunch of trash reviews only dumps would allow you. Anyone host that has spend lots of $$$ is not going to want some brat to come and there and write some BS because they found a hair in a carpet somewhere.
There is definitely a difference between writing nitpick reviews and writing negative reviews of a place based on legitimate issues. If you leave negative reviews complaining about finding a hair on the carpet then yeah good hosts probably aren't going to want someone who is that much of a nitpick.
But if you leave a review complaining about real issues like no towels, dirty sheets or bathroom then that's not going to hurt your chances with good hosts. Believe me I've left a bad review based on an Airbnb place being dirty, and I've left a neutrally toned review that complained about some minor issues like a slightly dangerous ladder leading up to the loft bed at once place I stayed at, and I don't have any issues getting great Airbnb places.
